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Michael Schroeder

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

The Sandino Rebellion Digital Historical Archive website, a work in progress, is envisioned as a comprehensive, interpretive, open-access digital archive housing all relevant primary documents, and rare, out-of-print, or hard-to-access published works, that treat the period of the Sandino rebellion in Nicaragua (1927–1934) and the counterinsurgency campaign waged by the U.S. and Nicaraguan governments against this homegrown, campesino-based nationalist insurgency led by Augusto C. Sandino, the supreme chief of the Defending Army of Nicaraguan National Sovereignty (Ejército Defensor de la Soberanía Nacional de Nicaragua, or EDSN). Primary documents, digitized from the originals in public and private archives in the United States, Nicaragua, Great Britain, Honduras, and elsewhere, are categorized by type, provenance, and theme, with many transcribed and fully searchable. The website currently housed more than 3,700 hitherto unpublished primary documents as of May 2014; ultimately, the goal is to make universally accessible approximately 30,000 documents, including letters, diaries, military reports, consular dispatches, court records, newspaper accounts, oral histories, photographs, maps, rare published works, and other materials, to be accompanied by interpretive commentaries on specific documents, events, issues, and controversies.

The digital archive is organized in the manner of a historian’s workspace in the wake of repeated visits to the many libraries, archives, and repositories that bear on the questions we seek to address. The criterion informing the selection of documents is simple: material is included if it helps to shed light on how Nicaraguans struggled to make their own history during this period. In the spirit of social and cultural history, the focus is on ordinary people and members of subordinate groups—campesinos, indigenous communities, women, migrants—while abiding attention is also paid to more prominent and powerful actors, including merchants, landowners, politicians, and military leaders.

Roughly two-thirds of this material was culled from Record Group 127 (Records of the United States Marines) in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which includes a staggering array of documentation relating to virtually every aspect of this rebellion and the counterinsurgency campaign that sought to crush it: patrol and combat reports, intelligence reports and memoranda, photographs, captured correspondence, court records, prisoners’ statements, and much else. Other major repositories and collections include the Library of Congress; the records of the U.S. Department of State (Record Groups 59 and 84 of the U.S. National Archives II in College Park, MD); the Marine Corps Research Center (Quantico, VA); the oral histories produced by the Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo in the 1980s (now the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica of the Universidad Centroamericana, or IHNCA-UCA, in Managua); and private collections, most notably material generously shared by Walter Castillo Sandino, the grandson of General Sandino.

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